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Title: Under Milk Wood
A Play for Voices
Author: Dylan Thomas
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
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Language: English
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Title: Under Milk Wood
A Play for Voices
Author: Dylan Thomas
Under Milk Wood
A Play for Voices
by
Dylan Thomas
First published 1954
UNDER MILK WOOD
[Silence]
FIRST VOICE (_Very softly_)
To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,
courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the
sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night
in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat
there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock,
the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds.
And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are
sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers,
the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher,
postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman,
drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot
cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft
or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux,
bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the
organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the
bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And
the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields,
and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed
yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly,
streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only _your_ eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded
town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the
invisible starfall, the darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed
stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the _Arethusa_, the
_Curlew_ and the _Skylark_, _Zanzibar_, _Rhiannon_, the _Rover_,
the _Cormorant_, and the _Star of Wales_ tilt and ride.
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional
salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row,
it is the grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, starfall,
the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in
bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and
bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes,
fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a
domino; in Ocky Milkman's lofts like a mouse with gloves;
in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night
in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its
hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot,
text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours
done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night
neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the
Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of
Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed;
tumbling by the Sailors Arms.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the
slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you
can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms. and petticoats
over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth,
Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching
pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the
eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes
and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes
and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.
From where you are, you can hear their dreams.
Captain Cat, the retired blind sea-captain, asleep in his
bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape best
cabin of Schooner House dreams of
SECOND VOICE
never such seas as any that swamped the decks of his _S.S.
Kidwelly_ bellying over the bedclothes and jellyfish-slippery
sucking him down salt deep into the Davy dark where the fish
come biting out and nibble him down to his wishbone, and
the long drowned nuzzle up to him.
FIRST DROWNED
Remember me, Captain?
CAPTAIN CAT
You're Dancing Williams!
FIRST DROWNED
I lost my step in Nantucket.
SECOND DROWNED
Do you see me, Captain? the white bone talking? I'm Tom-Fred
the donkeyman...we shared the same girl once...her name was
Mrs Probert...
WOMAN'S VOICE
Rosie Probert, thirty three Duck Lane. Come on up, boys,
I'm dead.
THIRD DROWNED
Hold me, Captain, I'm Jonah Jarvis, come to a bad end, very
enjoyable.
FOURTH DROWNED
Alfred Pomeroy Jones, sea-lawyer, born in Mumbles, sung
like a linnet, crowned you with a flagon, tattooed with
mermaids, thirst like a dredger, died of blisters.
FIRST DROWNED
This skull at your earhole is
FIFTH DROWNED
Curly Bevan. Tell my auntie it was me that pawned the ormolu
clock.
CAPTAIN CAT
Aye, aye, Curly.
SECOND DROWNED
Tell my missus no I never
THIRD DROWNED
I never done what she said I never.
FOURTH DROWNED
Yes they did.
FIFTH DROWNED
And who brings coconuts and shawls and parrots to _my_
Gwen now?
FIRST DROWNED
How's it above?
SECOND DROWNED
Is there rum and laverbread?
THIRD DROWNED
Bosoms and robins?
FOURTH DROWNED
Concertinas?
FIFTH DROWNED
Ebenezer's bell?
FIRST DROWNED
Fighting and onions?
SECOND DROWNED
And sparrows and daisies?
THIRD DROWNED
Tiddlers in a jamjar?
FOURTH DROWNED
Buttermilk and whippets?
FIFTH DROWNED
Rock-a-bye baby?
FIRST DROWNED
Washing on the line?
SECOND DROWNED
And old girls in the snug?
THIRD DROWNED
How's the tenors in Dowlais?
FOURTH DROWNED
Who milks the cows in Maesgwyn?
FIFTH DROWNED
When she smiles, is there dimples?
FIRST DROWNED
What's the smell of parsley?
CAPTAIN CAT
Oh, my dead dears!
FIRST VOICE
From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring,
moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper,
dream of
SECOND VOICE
her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned,
whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and
barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes
like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving
hotwaterbottled body.
MR EDWARDS
Myfanwy Price!
MISS PRICE
Mr Mog Edwards!
MR EDWARDS
I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the
flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino,
tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill
in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take
you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums
on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh
wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric
toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.
MISS PRICE
I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the
money, to be comfy. I will warm your heart by the fire so
that you can slip it in under your vest when the shop is
closed.
MR EDWARDS
Myfanwy, Myfanwy, before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer
will you say
MISS PRICE
Yes, Mog, yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes.
MR EDWARDS
And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for
our wedding.
[_Noise of money-tills and chapel bells_
FIRST VOICE
Come now, drift up the dark, come up the drifting sea-dark
street now in the dark night seesawing like the sea, to the
bible-black airless attic over Jack Black the cobbler's
shop where alone and savagely Jack Black sleeps in a
nightshirt tied to his ankles with elastic and dreams of
SECOND VOICE
chasing the naughty couples down the grassgreen gooseberried
double bed of the wood, flogging the tosspots in the
spit-and-sawdust, driving out the bare bold girls from the
sixpenny hops of his nightmares.
JACK BLACK (_Loudly_)
Ach y fi!
Ach y fi!
FIRST VOICE
Evans the Death, the undertaker,
SECOND VOICE
laughs high and aloud in his sleep and curls up his toes as
he sees, upon waking fifty years ago, snow lie deep on the
goosefield behind the sleeping house; and he runs out into
the field where his mother is making welsh-cakes in the
snow, and steals a fistful of snowflakes and currants and
climbs back to bed to eat them cold and sweet under the
warm, white clothes while his mother dances in the snow
kitchen crying out for her lost currants.
FIRST VOICE
And in the little pink-eyed cottage next to the undertaker's,
lie, alone, the seventeen snoring gentle stone of Mister
Waldo, rabbitcatcher, barber, herbalist, catdoctor, quack,
his fat pink hands, palms up, over the edge of the patchwork
quilt, his black boots neat and tidy in the washing-basin,
his bowler on a nail above the bed, a milk stout and a slice
of cold bread pudding under the pillow; and, dripping in
the dark, he dreams of
MOTHER
This little piggy went to market
This little piggy stayed at home
This little piggy had roast beef
This little piggy had none
And this little piggy went
LITTLE BOY
wee wee wee wee wee
MOTHER
all the way home to
WIFE (_Screaming_)
Waldo! Wal-do!
MR WALDO
Yes, Blodwen love?
WIFE
Oh, what'll the neighbours say, what'll the neighbours...
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Poor Mrs Waldo
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
What she puts up with
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Never should of married
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
If she didn't had to
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Same as her mother
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
There's a husband for you
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Bad as his father
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
And you know where he ended
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Up in the asylum
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
Crying for his ma
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Every Saturday
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
He hasn't got a leg
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
And carrying on
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
With that Mrs Beattie Morris
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Up in the quarry
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
And seen her baby
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
It's got his nose
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
Oh it makes my heart bleed
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
What he'll do for drink
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
He sold the pianola
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
And her sewing machine
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
Falling in the gutter
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Talking to the lamp-post
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
Using language
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Singing in the w
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
Poor Mrs Waldo
WIFE (_Tearfully_)
...Oh, Waldo, Waldo!
MR WALDO
Hush, love, hush. I'm widower Waldo now.
MOTHER (_Screaming_)
Waldo, Wal-do!
LITTLE BOY
Yes, our mum?
MOTHER
Oh, what'll the neighbours say, what'll the neighbours...
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Black as a chimbley
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Ringing doorbells
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Breaking windows
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Making mudpies
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Stealing currants
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Chalking words
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Saw him in the bushes
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Playing mwchins
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Send him to bed without any supper
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Give him sennapods and lock him in the dark
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Off to the reformatory
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Off to the reformatory
TOGETHER
Learn him with a slipper on his b.t.m.
ANOTHER MOTHER (_Screaming_)
Waldo, Wal-do! what you doing with our Matti?
LITTLE BOY
Give us a kiss, Matti Richards.
LITTLE GIRL
Give us a penny then.
MR WALDO
I only got a halfpenny.
FIRST WOMAN
Lips is a penny.
PREACHER
Will you take this woman Matti Richards
SECOND WOMAN
Dulcie Prothero
THIRD WOMAN
Effie Bevan
FOURTH WOMAN
Lil the Gluepot
FIFTH WOMAN
Mrs Flusher
WIFE
Blodwen Bowen
PREACHER
To be your awful wedded wife
LITTLE BOY (_Screaming_)
No, no, no!
FIRST VOICE
Now, in her iceberg-white, holily laundered crinoline
nightgown, under virtuous polar sheets, in her spruced and
scoured dust-defying bedroom in trig and trim Bay View, a
house for paying guests, at the top of the town, Mrs
Ogmore-Pritchard widow, twice, of Mr Ogmore, linoleum,
retired, and Mr Pritchard, failed bookmaker, who maddened
by besoming, swabbing and scrubbing, the voice of the
vacuum-cleaner and the fume of polish, ironically swallowed
disinfectant, fidgets in her rinsed sleep, wakes in a
dream, and nudges in the ribs dead Mr Ogmore, dead Mr
Pritchard, ghostly on either side.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
Mr Ogmore!
Mr Pritchard!
It is time to inhale your balsam.
MR OGMORE
Oh, Mrs Ogmore!
MR PRITCHARD
Oh, Mrs Pritchard!
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
Soon it will be time to get up.
Tell me your tasks, in order.
MR OGMORE
I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas.
MR PRITCHARD
I must take my cold bath which is good for me.
MR OGMORE
I must wear my flannel band to ward off sciatica.
MR PRITCHARD
I must dress behind the curtain and put on my apron.
MR OGMORE
I must blow my nose.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
In the garden, if you please.
MR OGMORE
In a piece of tissue-paper which I afterwards burn.
MR PRITCHARD
I must take my salts which are nature's friend.
MR OGMORE
I must boil the drinking water because of germs.
MR PRITCHARD
I must make my herb tea which is free from tannin.
MR OGMORE
And have a charcoal biscuit which is good for me.
MR PRITCHARD
I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
In the woodshed, if you please.
MR PRITCHARD
And dust the parlour and spray the canary.
MR OGMORE
I must put on rubber gloves and search the peke for fleas.
MR PRITCHARD
I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.
FIRST VOICE
In Butcher Beynon's, Gossamer Beynon, daughter, schoolteacher,
dreaming deep, daintily ferrets under a fluttering hummock
of chicken's feathers in a slaughterhouse that has chintz
curtains and a three-pieced suite, and finds, with no surprise,
a small rough ready man with a bushy tail winking in a paper
carrier.
GOSSAMER BEYNON
At last, my love,
FIRST VOICE
sighs Gossamer Beynon. And the bushy tail wags rude and ginger.
ORGAN MORGAN
Help,
SECOND VOICE
cries Organ Morgan, the organist, in his dream,
ORGAN MORGAN
There is perturbation and music in Coronation Street! All
the spouses are honking like geese and the babies singing
opera. P.C. Attila Rees has got his truncheon out and is
playing cadenzas by the pump, the cows from Sunday Meadow
ring like reindeer, and on the roof of Handel Villa see the
Women's Welfare hoofing, bloomered, in the moon.
FIRST VOICE
At the sea-end of town, Mr and Mrs Floyd, the cocklers, are
sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless,
salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box.
And high above, in Salt Lake Farm, Mr Utah Watkins counts,
all night, the wife-faced sheep as they leap the fences on
the hill, smiling and knitting and bleating just like Mrs
Utah Watkins.
UTAH WATKINS (_Yawning_)
Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, forty-eight,
eighty-nine...
MRS UTAH WATKINS (_Bleating_)
Knit one slip one
Knit two together
Pass the slipstitch over...
FIRST VOICE
Ocky Milkman, drowned asleep in Cockle Street, is emptying
his churns into the Dewi River,
OCKY MILKMAN (_Whispering_)
regardless of expense,
FIRST VOICE
and weeping like a funeral.
SECOND VOICE
Cherry Owen, next door, lifts a tankard to his lips but nothing
flows out of it. He shakes the tankard. It turns into a
fish. He drinks the fish.
FIRST VOICE
P.C. Attila Rees lumps out of bed, dead to the dark and still
foghorning, and drags out his helmet from under the bed;
but deep in the backyard lock-up of his sleep a mean voice
murmurs
A VOICE (_Murmuring_)
You'll be sorry for this in the morning,
FIRST VOICE
and he heave-ho's back to bed. His helmet swashes in the dark.
SECOND VOICE
Willy Nilly, postman, asleep up street, walks fourteen miles
to deliver the post as he does every day of the night, and
rat-a-tats hard and sharp on Mrs Willy Nilly.
MRS WILLY NILLY
Don't spank me, please, teacher,
SECOND VOICE
whimpers his wife at his side, but every night of her married
life she has been late for school.
FIRST VOICE
Sinbad Sailors, over the taproom of the Sailors Arms, hugs
his damp pillow whose secret name is Gossamer Beynon.
A mogul catches Lily Smalls in the wash-house.
LILY SMALLS
Ooh, you old mogul!
SECOND VOICE
Mrs Rose Cottage's eldest, Mae, peals off her pink-and-white
skin in a furnace in a tower in a cave in a waterfall in a
wood and waits there raw as an onion for Mister Right to
leap up the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves like a
brilliantined trout.
MAE ROSE COTTAGE (_Very close and softly, drawing
out the words_)
Call me Dolores
Like they do in the stories.
FIRST VOICE
Alone until she dies, Bessie Bighead, hired help, born in
the workhouse, smelling of the cowshed, snores bass and
gruff on a couch of straw in a loft in Salt Lake Farm and
picks a posy of daisies in Sunday Meadow to put on the grave
of Gomer Owen who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she
wasn't looking and never kissed her again although she was
looking all the time.
And the Inspectors of Cruelty fly down into Mrs Butcher
Brynon's dream to persecute Mr Beynon for selling
BUTCHER BEYNON
owlmeat, dogs' eyes, manchop.
SECOND VOICE
Mr Beynon, in butcher's bloodied apron, spring-heels down
Coronation Street, a finger, not his own, in his mouth.
Straightfaced in his cunning sleep he pulls the legs of
his dreams and
BUTCHER BEYNON
hunting on pigback shoots down the wild giblets.
ORGAN MORGAN (_High and softly_)
Help!
GOSSAMER BEYNON (_Softly_)
My foxy darling.
FIRST VOICE
Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the
streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the
SECOND VOICE
titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and
bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva
and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks
and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine
and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.
FIRST VOICE
The owls are hunting. Look, over Bethesda gravestones one
hoots and swoops and catches a mouse by Hannah Rees, Beloved
Wife. And in Coronation Street, which you alone can see it
is so dark under the chapel in the skies, the Reverend Eli
Jenkins, poet, preacher, turns in his deep towards-dawn
sleep and dreams of
REV. ELI JENKINS
Eisteddfodau.
SECOND VOICE
He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn,
all night long in his druid's seedy nightie in a beer-tent
black with parchs.
FIRST VOICE
Mr Pugh, schoolmaster, fathoms asleep, pretends to be sleeping,
spies foxy round the droop of his nightcap and pssst! whistles up
MR PUGH
Murder.
FIRST VOICE
Mrs Organ Morgan, groceress, coiled grey like a dormouse,
her paws to her ears, conjures
MRS ORGAN MORGAN
Silence.
SECOND VOICE
She sleeps very dulcet in a cove of wool, and trumpeting
Organ Morgan at her side snores no louder than a
spider.
FIRST VOICE
Mary Ann Sailors dreams of
MARY ANN SAILORS
The Garden of Eden.
FIRST VOICE
She comes in her smock-frock and clogs
MARY ANN SAILORS
away from the cool scrubbed cobbled kitchen with the
Sunday-school pictures on the whitewashed wall and the
farmers' almanac hung above the settle and the sides of
bacon on the ceiling hooks, and goes down the cockleshelled
paths of that applepie kitchen garden, ducking under the
gippo's clothespegs, catching her apron on the blackcurrant
bushes, past beanrows and onion-bed and tomatoes ripening
on the wall towards the old man playing the harmonium in
the orchard, and sits down on the grass at his side and
shells the green peas that grow up through the lap of her
frock that brushes the dew.
FIRST VOICE
In Donkey Street, so furred with sleep, Dai Bread, Polly
Garter, Nogood Boyo, and Lord Cut-Glass sigh before the
dawn that is about to be and dream of
DAI BREAD
Harems.
POLLY GARTER
Babies.
NOGOOD BOYO
Nothing.
LORD CUT-GLASS
Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock.
FIRST VOICE
Time passes. Listen. Time passes. An owl flies I home past
Bethesda, to a chapel in an oak. And the dawn inches up.
[_One distant bell-note, faintly reverberating_
FIRST VOICE
Stand on this hill. This is Llaregyb Hill, old as the hills,
high, cool, and green, and from this small circle, of stones,
made not by druids but by Mrs Beynon's Billy, you can see all
the town below you sleeping in the first of the dawn.
You can hear the love-sick woodpigeons mooning in bed. A dog
barks in his sleep, farmyards away. The town ripples like a
lake in the waking haze.
VOICE OF A GUIDE-BOOK
Less than five hundred souls inhabit the three quaint streets
and the few narrow by-lanes and scattered farmsteads that
constitute this small, decaying watering-place which may,
indeed, be called a 'backwater of life' without disrespect
to its natives who possess, to this day, a salty individuality
of their own. The main street, Coronation Street, consists,
for the most part, of humble, two-storied houses many of which
attempt to achieve some measure of gaiety by prinking
themselves out in crude colours and by the liberal use of
pinkwash, though there are remaining a few eighteenth-century
houses of more pretension, if, on the whole, in a sad state
of disrepair. Though there is little to attract the hillclimber,
the healthseeker, the sportsman, or the weekending motorist,
the contemplative may, if sufficiently attracted to spare
it some leisurely hours, find, in its cobbled streets and
its little fishing harbour, in its several curious customs,
and in the conversation of its local 'characters,' some of
that picturesque sense of the past so frequently lacking in
towns and villages which have kept more abreast of the times.
The one place of worship, with its neglected graveyard, is of
no architectural interest. The River Dewi is said to abound in
trout, but is much poached.
[_A cock crows_
FIRST VOICE
The principality of the sky lightens now, over our green
hill, into spring morning larked and crowed and belling.
[_Slow bell notes_
FIRST VOICE
Who pulls the townhall bellrope but blind Captain Cat? One
by one, the sleepers are rung out of sleep this one morning
as every morning. And soon you shall see the chimneys' slow
upflying snow as Captain Cat, in sailor's cap and seaboots,
announces to-day with his loud get-out-of-bed bell.
SECOND VOICE
The Reverend Eli Jenkins, in Bethesda House, gropes out of
bed into his preacher's black, combs back his bard's white
hair, forgets to wash, pads barefoot downstairs, opens the
front door, stands in the doorway and, looking out at the
day and up at the eternal hill, and hearing the sea break
and the gab of birds, remembers his own verses and tells
them softly to empty Coronation Street that is rising and
raising its blinds.
REV. ELI JENKINS
Dear Gwalia! I know there are
Towns lovelier than ours,
And fairer hills and loftier far,
And groves more full of flowers,
And boskier woods more blithe with spring
And bright with birds' adorning,
And sweeter bards than I to sing
Their praise this beauteous morning.
By Cader Idris, tempest-torn,
Or Moel yr Wyddfa's glory,
Carnedd Llewelyn beauty born,
Plinlimmon old in story,
By mountains where King Arthur dreams,
By Penmaenmawr defiant,
Llaregyb Hill a molehill seems,
A pygmy to a giant.
By Sawdde, Senny, Dovey, Dee,
Edw, Eden, Aled, all,
Taff and Towy broad and free,
Llyfnant with its waterfall,
Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulais, Daw,
Ely, Gwili, Ogwr, Nedd,
Small is our River Dewi, Lord,
A baby on a rushy bed.
By Carreg Cennen, King of time,
Our Heron Head is only
A bit of stone with seaweed spread
Where gulls come to be lonely.
A tiny dingle is Milk Wood
By Golden Grove 'neath Grongar,
But let me choose and oh! I should
Love all my life and longer
To stroll among our trees and stray
In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,
And hear the Dewi sing all day,
And never, never leave the town.
SECOND VOICE
The Reverend Jenkins closes the front door. His morning
service is over.
[_Slow bell notes_
FIRST VOICE
Now, woken at last by the out-of-bed-sleepy-head-Polly-put-
the-kettle-on townhall bell, Lily Smalls, Mrs Beynon's
treasure, comes downstairs from a dream of royalty who all
night long went larking with her full of sauce in the Milk
Wood dark, and puts the kettle on the primus ring in Mrs
Beynon's kitchen, and looks at herself in Mr Beynon's
shaving-glass over the sink, and sees:
LILY SMALLS
Oh there's a face!
Where you get that hair from?
Got it from a old tom cat.
Give it back then, love.
Oh there's a perm!
Where you get that nose from, Lily?
Got it from my father, silly.
You've got it on upside down!
Oh there's a conk!
Look at your complexion!
Oh no, you look.
Needs a bit of make-up.
Needs a veil.
Oh there's glamour!
Where you get that smile,
Lil? Never you mind, girl.
Nobody loves you.
That's what you think.
Who is it loves you?
Shan't tell.
Come on, Lily.
Cross your heart then?
Cross my heart.
FIRST VOICE
And very softly, her lips almost touching her reflection,
she breathes the name and clouds the shaving-glass.
MRS BEYNON (_Loudly, from above_)
Lily!
LILY SMALLS (_Loudly_)
Yes, mum.
MRS BEYNON
Where's my tea, girl?
LILY SMALLS
(_Softly_) Where d'you think? In the cat-box?
(_Loudly_) Coming up, mum.
FIRST VOICE
Mr Pugh, in the School House opposite, takes up the morning
tea to Mrs Pugh, and whispers on the stairs
MR. PUGH
Here's your arsenic, dear.
And your weedkiller biscuit.
I've throttled your parakeet.
I've spat in the vases.
I've put cheese in the mouseholes.
Here's your... [_Door creaks open_
...nice tea, dear.
MRS PUGH
Too much sugar.
MR PUGH
You haven't tasted it yet, dear.
MRS PUGH
Too much milk, then. Has Mr Jenkins said his poetry?
MR PUGH
Yes, dear.
MRS PUGH
Then it's time to get up. Give me my glasses.
No, not my _reading_ glasses, I want to look out.
I want to see
SECOND VOICE
Lily Smalls the treasure down on her red knees washing the
front step.
MRS PUGH
She's tucked her dress in her bloomers--oh, the baggage!
SECOND VOICE
P.C. Attila Rees, ox-broad, barge-booted, stamping out of
Handcuff House in a heavy beef-red huff, black browed under
his damp helmet...
MRS PUGH
He's going to arrest Polly Garter, mark my words.
MR PUGH
What for, dear?
MRS PUGH
For having babies.
SECOND VOICE
...and lumbering down towards the strand to see that the
sea is still there.
FIRST VOICE
Mary Ann Sailors, opening her bedroom window above the
taproom and calling out to the heavens
MARY ANN SAILORS
I'm eighty-five years three months and a day!
MRS PUGH
I will say this for her, she never makes a mistake.
FIRST VOICE
Organ Morgan at his bedroom window playing chords on the
sill to the morning fishwife gulls who, heckling over Donkey
Street, observe
DAI BREAD
Me, Dai Bread, hurrying to the bakery, pushing in my
shirt-tails, buttoning my waistcoat, ping goes a button,
why can't they sew them, no time for breakfast, nothing for
breakfast, there's wives for you.
MRS DAI BREAD ONE
Me, Mrs Dai Bread One, capped and shawled and no old corset,
nice to be comfy, nice to be nice, clogging on the cobbles
to stir up a neighbour. Oh, Mrs Sarah, can you spare a loaf,
love? Dai Bread forgot the bread. There's a lovely morning!
How's your boils this morning? Isn't that good news now,
it's a change to sit down. Ta, Mrs Sarah.
MRS DAI BREAD TWO
Me, Mrs Dai Bread Two, gypsied to kill in a silky scarlet
petticoat above my knees, dirty pretty knees, see my body
through my petticoat brown as a berry, high-heel shoes with
one heel missing, tortoiseshell comb in my bright black
slinky hair, nothing else at all but a dab of scent, lolling
gaudy at the doorway, tell your fortune in the tea-leaves,
scowling at the sunshine, lighting up my pipe.
LORD CUT-GLASS
Me, Lord Cut-Glass, in an old frock-coat belonged to Eli
Jenkins and a pair of postman's trousers from Bethesda
Jumble, running out of doors to empty slops--mind there,
Rover!--and then running in again, tick tock.
NOGOOD BOYO
Me, Nogood Boyo, up to no good in the wash-house
MISS PRICE
Me, Miss Price, in my pretty print housecoat, deft at the
clothesline, natty as a jenny-wren, then pit-pat back to my
egg in its cosy, my crisp toast-fingers, my home-made plum
and butterpat.
POLLY GARTER
Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line, giving the breast
in the garden to my bonny new baby. Nothing grows in our
garden, only washing. And babies. And where's their fathers
live, my love? Over the hills and far away. You're looking
up at me now. I know what you're thinking, you poor little
milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you
should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me. Oh, isn't
life a terrible thing, thank God?
[_Single long high chord on strings_
FIRST VOICE
Now frying-pans spit, kettles and cats purr in the kitchen.
The town smells of seaweed and breakfast all the way down
from Bay View, where Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, in smock and turban,
big-besomed to engage the dust, picks at her starchless bread
and sips lemon-rind tea, to Bottom Cottage, where Mr Waldo,
in bowler and bib, gobbles his bubble-and-squeak and kippers
and swigs from the saucebottle. Mary Ann Sailors
MARY ANN SAILORS
praises the Lord who made porridge.
FIRST VOICE
Mr Pugh
MR PUGH
remembers ground glass as he juggles his omelet.
FIRST VOICE
Mrs Pugh
MRS PUGH
nags the salt-cellar.
FIRST VOICE
Willy Nilly postman
WILLY NILLY
downs his last bucket of black brackish tea and rumbles out
bandy to the clucking back where the hens twitch and grieve
for their tea-soaked sops.
FIRST VOICE
Mrs Willy Nilly
MRS WILLY NILLY
full of tea to her double-chinned brim broods and bubbles
over her coven of kettles on the hissing hot range always
ready to steam open the mail.
FIRST VOICE
The Reverend Eli Jenkins
REV. ELI JENKINS
finds a rhyme and dips his pen in his cocoa.
FIRST VOICE
Lord Cut-Glass in his ticking kitchen
LORD CUT-GLASS
scampers from clock to clock, a bunch of clock-keys in one
hand, a fish-head in the other.
FIRST VOICE
Captain Cat in his galley
CAPTAIN CAT
blind and fine-fingered savours his sea-fry.
FIRST VOICE
Mr and Mrs Cherry Owen, in their Donkey Street room that is
bedroom, parlour, kitchen, and scullery, sit down to last
night's supper of onions boiled in their overcoats and broth
of spuds and baconrind and leeks and bones.
MRS CHERRY OWEN
See that smudge on the wall by the picture of Auntie Blossom?
That's where you threw the sago.
[_Cherry Owen laughs with delight_
MRS CHERRY OWEN
You only missed me by a inch.
CHERRY OWEN
I always miss Auntie Blossom too.
MRS CHERRY OWEN
Remember last night? In you reeled, my boy, as drunk as a
deacon with a big wet bucket and a fish-frail full of stout
and you looked at me and you said, 'God has come home!' you
said, and then over the bucket you went, sprawling and
bawling, and the floor was all flagons and eels.
CHERRY OWEN
Was I wounded?
MRS CHERRY OWEN
And then you took off your trousers and you said, 'Does
anybody want a fight!' Oh, you old baboon.
CHERRY OWEN
Give me a kiss.
MRS CHERRY OWEN
And then you sang 'Bread of Heaven,' tenor and bass.
CHERRY OWEN
I always sing 'Bread of Heaven.'
MRS CHERRY OWEN
And then you did a little dance on the table.
CHERRY OWEN
I did?
MRS CHERRY OWEN
Drop dead!
CHERRY OWEN
And then what did I do?
MRS CHERRY OWEN
Then you cried like a baby and said you were a poor drunk
orphan with nowhere to go but the grave.
CHERRY OWEN
And what did I do next, my dear?
MRS CHERRY OWEN
Then you danced on the table all over again and said you
were King Solomon Owen and I was your Mrs Sheba.
CHERRY OWEN (_Softy_)
And then?
MRS CHERRY OWEN
And then I got you into bed and you snored all night like
a brewery.
[_Mr and Mrs Cherry Owen laugh delightedly together_
FIRST VOICE
From Beynon Butchers in Coronation Street, the smell of
fried liver sidles out with onions on its breath. And listen!
In the dark breakfast-room behind the shop, Mr and Mrs Beynon,
waited upon by their treasure, enjoy, between bites, their
everymorning hullabaloo, and Mrs Beynon slips the gristly
bits under the tasselled tablecloth to her fat cat.
[_Cat purrs_
MRS BEYNON
She likes the liver, Ben.
MR BEYNON
She ought to do, Bess. It's her brother's.
MRS BEYNON (_Screaming_)
Oh, d'you hear that, Lily?
LILY SMALLS
Yes, mum.
MRS BEYNON
We're eating pusscat.
LILY SMALLS
Yes, mum.
MRS BEYNON
Oh, you cat-butcher!
MR BEYNON
It was doctored, mind.
MRS BEYNON (_Hysterical_)
What's that got to do with it?
MR BEYNON
Yesterday we had mole.
MRS BEYNON
Oh, Lily, Lily!
MR BEYNON
Monday, otter. Tuesday, shrews.
[_Mrs Beynon screams_
LILY SMALLS
Go on, Mrs Beynon. He's the biggest liar in town.
MRS BEYNON
Don't you dare say that about Mr Beynon.
LILY SMALLS
Everybody knows it, mum.
MRS BEYNON
Mr Beynon never tells a lie. Do you, Ben?
MR BEYNON
No, Bess. And now I am going out after the corgies, with my
little cleaver.
MRS BEYNON
Oh, Lily, Lily!
FIRST VOICE
Up the street, in the Sailors Arms, Sinbad Sailors, grandson
of Mary Ann Sailors, draws a pint in the sunlit bar. The
ship's clock in the bar says half past eleven. Half past
eleven is opening time. The hands of the clock have stayed
still at half past eleven for fifty years. It is always
opening time in the Sailors Arms.
SINBAD
Here's to me, Sinbad.
FIRST VOICE
All over the town, babies and old men are cleaned and put into
their broken prams and wheeled on to the sunlit cockled cobbles
or out into the backyards under the dancing underclothes, and
left. A baby cries.
OLD MAN
I want my pipe and he wants his bottle.
[_School bell rings_
FIRST VOICE
Noses are wiped, heads picked, hair combed, paws scrubbed,
ears boxed, and the children shrilled off to school.
SECOND VOICE
Fishermen grumble to their nets. Nogood Boyo goes out in
the dinghy _Zanzibar_, ships the oars, drifts slowly in the
dab-filled bay, and, lying on his back in the unbaled water,
among crabs' legs and tangled lines, looks up at the
spring sky.
NOGOOD BOYO (_Softly, lazily_)
I don't know who's up there and I don't care.
FIRST VOICE
He turns his head and looks up at Llaregyb Hill, and sees,
among green lathered trees, the white houses of the strewn
away farms, where farmboys whistle, dogs shout, cows low,
but all too far away for him, or you, to hear. And in the
town, the shops squeak open. Mr Edwards, in butterfly-collar
and straw-hat at the doorway of Manchester House, measures
with his eye the dawdlers-by for striped flannel shirts and
shrouds and flowery blouses, and bellows to himself in the
darkness behind his eye
MR EDWARDS (_Whispers_)
I love Miss Price.
FIRST VOICE
Syrup is sold in the post-office. A car drives to market,
full of fowls and a farmer. Milk-churns stand at Coronation
Corner like short silver policemen. And, sitting at the
open window of Schooner House, blind Captain Cat hears all
the morning of the town.
[_School bell in background.
Children's voices. The noise of
children's feet on the cobbles_
CAPTAIN CAT (_Softly, to himself_)
Maggie Richards, Ricky Rhys, Tommy Powell, our Sal, little
Gerwain, Billy Swansea with the dog's voice, one of Mr
Waldo's, nasty Humphrey, Jackie with the sniff....Where's
Dicky's Albie? and the boys from Ty-pant? Perhaps they got
the rash again.
[_A sudden cry among the children's voices_
CAPTAIN CAT
Somebody's hit Maggie Richards. Two to one it's Billy Swansea.
Never trust a boy who barks.
[_A burst of yelping crying_
Right again! It's Billy.
FIRST VOICE
And the children's voices cry away.
[_Postman's rat-a-tat on door, distant_
CAPTAIN CAT (_Softly, to himself_)
That's Willy Nilly knocking at Bay View. Rat-a-tat, very
soft. The knocker's got a kid glove on. Who's sent a letter
to Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard?
[_Rat-a-tat, distant again_
CAPTAIN CAT
Careful now, she swabs the front glassy. Every step's like
a bar of soap. Mind your size twelveses. That old Bessie
would beeswax the lawn to make the birds slip.
WILLY NILLY
Morning, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
Good morning, postman.
WILLY NILLY
Here's a letter for you with stamped and addressed envelope
enclosed, all the way from Builth Wells. A gentleman wants
to study birds and can he have accommodation for two weeks
and a bath vegetarian.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
No.
WILLY NILLY (_Persuasively_)
You wouldn't know he was in the house, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.
He'd be out in the mornings at the bang of dawn with his bag
of breadcrumbs and his little telescope...
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
And come home at all hours covered with feathers. I don't
want persons in my nice clean rooms breathing all over the
chairs...
WILLY NILLY
Cross my heart, he won't breathe.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
...and putting their feet on my carpets and sneezing on my
china and sleeping in my sheets...
WILLY NILLY
He only wants a single bed, Mrs Ogmore. Pritchard.
[_Door slams_
CAPTAIN CAT (_Softly_)
And back she goes to the kitchen to polish the potatoes.
FIRST VOICE
Captain Cat hears Willy Nilly's feet heavy on the distant
cobbles.
CAPTAIN CAT
One, two, three, four, five...That's Mrs Rose Cottage.
What's to-day? To-day she gets the letter from her sister
in Gorslas. How's the twins' teeth?
He's stopping at School House.
WILLY NILLY
Morning, Mrs Pugh. Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard won't have a
gentleman in from Builth Wells because he'll sleep in her
sheets, Mrs Rose Cottage's sister in Gorslas's twins have
got to have them out...
MRS PUGH
Give me the parcel.
WILLY NILLY
It's for _Mr_ Pugh, Mrs Pugh.
MRS PUGH
Never you mind. What's inside it?
WILLY NILLY
A book called _Lives of the Great Poisoners_.
CAPTAIN CAT
That's Manchester House.
WILLY NILLY
Morning, Mr Edwards. Very small news. Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard
won't have birds in the house, and Mr Pugh's bought a book
now on how to do in Mrs Pugh.
MR EDWARDS
Have you got a letter from _her?_
WILLY NILLY
Miss Price loves you with all her heart. Smelling of lavender
to-day. She's down to the last of the elderflower wine but
the quince jam's bearing up and she's knitting roses on the
doilies. Last week she sold three jars of boiled sweets,
pound of humbugs, half a box of jellybabies and six coloured
photos of Llaregyb. Yours for ever. Then twenty-one X's.
MR EDWARDS
Oh, Willy Nilly, she's a ruby! Here's my letter. Put it
into her hands now.
[_Slow feet on cobbles, quicker feet approaching_
CAPTAIN CAT
Mr Waldo hurrying to the Sailors Arms. Pint of stout with
a egg in it. [_Footsteps stop_
(_Softly_) There's a letter for him.
WILLY NILLY
It's another paternity summons, Mr Waldo.
FIRST VOICE
The quick footsteps hurry on along the cobbles and up
three steps to the Sailors Arms.
MR WALDO (_Calling out_)
Quick, Sinbad. Pint of stout. And no egg in.
FIRST VOICE
People are moving now up and down the cobbled street.
CAPTAIN CAT
All the women are out this morning, in the sun. You can
tell it's Spring. There goes Mrs Cherry, you can tell her
by her trotters, off she trots new as a daisy. Who's that
talking by the pump? Mrs Floyd and Boyo, talking flatfish.
What can you talk about flatfish? That's Mrs Dai Bread
One, waltzing up the street like a jelly, every time she
shakes it's slap slap slap. Who's that? Mrs Butcher Beynon
with her pet black cat, it follows her everywhere, miaow
and all. There goes Mrs Twenty-Three, important, the sun
gets up and goes down in her dewlap, when she shuts her
eyes, it's night. High heels now, in the morning too, Mrs
Rose Cottage's eldest Mae, seventeen and never been kissed
ho ho, going young and milking under my window to the
field with the nannygoats, she reminds me all the way.
Can't hear what the women are gabbing round the pump. Same
as ever. Who's having a baby, who blacked whose eye, seen
Polly Garter giving her belly an airing, there should be
a law, seen Mrs Beynon's new mauve jumper, it's her old
grey jumper dyed, who's dead, who's dying, there's a
lovely day, oh the cost of soapflakes!
[_Organ music, distant_
CAPTAIN CAT
Organ Morgan's at it early. You can tell it's Spring.
FIRST VOICE
And he hears the noise of milk-cans.
CAPTAIN CAT
Ocky Milkman on his round. I will say this, his milk's as
fresh as the dew. Half dew it is. Snuffle on, Ocky,
watering the town...Somebody's coming. Now the voices
round the pump can see somebody coming. Hush, there's a
hush! You can tell by the noise of the hush, it's Polly
Garter. (_Louder_) Hullo, Polly, who's there?
POLLY GARTER (_Off_)
Me, love.
CAPTAIN CAT
_That's_ Polly Garter. (_Softly_) Hullo, Polly my love, can
you hear the dumb goose-hiss of the wives as they huddle
and peck or flounce at a waddle away? Who cuddled you
when? Which of their gandering hubbies moaned in Milk Wood
for your naughty mothering arms and body like a wardrobe,
love? Scrub the floors of the Welfare Hall for the
Mothers' Union Social Dance, you're one mother won't
wriggle her roly poly bum or pat her fat little buttery
feet in that wedding-ringed holy to-night though the
waltzing breadwinners snatched from the cosy smoke of the
Sailors Arms will grizzle and mope.
[_A cock crows_
CAPTAIN CAT
Too late, cock, too late
SECOND VOICE
for the town's half over with its morning. The morning's
busy as bees.
[_Organ music fades into silence_
FIRST VOICE
There's the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles
of the humming streets, hammering of horse- shoes, gobble
quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced
boughs, braying on Donkey Down. Bread is baking, pigs are
grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk-churns bell, tills
ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing. Oh, the Spring
whinny and morning moo from the clog dancing farms, the
gulls' gab and rabble on the boat-bobbing river and sea
and the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of
sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock
strike, bull bellow, and the ragged gabble of the
beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs
Organ Morgan's general shop where everything is sold:
custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp-nets, sugar,
stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles.
FIRST WOMAN
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard
SECOND WOMAN
la di da
FIRST WOMAN
got a man in Builth Wells
THIRD WOMAN
and he got a little telescope to look at birds
SECOND WOMAN
Willy Nilly said
THIRD WOMAN
Remember her first husband? He didn't need a telescope
FIRST WOMAN
he looked at them undressing through the keyhole
THIRD WOMAN
and he used to shout Tallyho
SECOND WOMAN
but Mr Ogmore was a proper gentleman
FIRST WOMAN
even though he hanged his collie.
THIRD WOMAN
Seen Mrs Butcher Beynon?
SECOND WOMAN
she said Butcher Beynon put dogs in the mincer
FIRST WOMAN
go on, he's pulling her leg
THIRD WOMAN
now don't you dare tell her that, there's a dear
SECOND WOMAN
or she'll think he's trying to pull it off and eat it,
FOURTH WOMAN
There's a nasty lot live here when you come to think.
FIRST WOMAN
Look at that Nogood Boyo now
SECOND WOMAN
too lazy to wipe his snout
THIRD WOMAN
and going out fishing every day and all he ever brought
back was a Mrs Samuels
FIRST WOMAN
been in the water a week.
SECOND WOMAN
And look at Ocky Milkman's wife that nobody's ever seen
FIRST WOMAN
he keeps her in the cupboard with the empties
THIRD WOMAN
and think of Dai Bread with two wives
SECONE WOMAN
one for the daytime one for the night.
FOURTH WOMAN
Men are brutes on the quiet.
THIRD WOMAN
And how's Organ Morgan, Mrs Morgan?
FIRST WOMAN
you look dead beat
SECOND WOMAN
it's organ organ all the time with him
THIRD WOMAN
up every night until midnight playing the organ.
MRS ORGAN MORGAN
Oh, I'm a martyr to music.
FIRST VOICE
Outside, the sun springs down on the rough and tumbling
town. It runs through the hedges of Goosegog Lane, cuffing
the birds to sing. Spring whips green down Cockle Row, and
the shells ring out. Llaregyb this snip of a morning is
wildfruit and warm, the streets, fields, sands and waters
springing in the young sun.
SECOND VOICE
Evans the Death presses hard with black gloves on the
coffin of his breast in case his heart jumps out,
EVANS THE DEATH (_Harshly_)
Where's your dignity. Lie down.
SECOND VOICE
Spring stirs Gossamer Beynon schoolmistress like spoon.
GOSSAMER BEYNON (_Tearfully_)
Oh, what can I do? I'll never be refined if I twitch.
SECOND VOICE
Spring this strong morning foams in a flame in Jack Black
as he cobbles a high-heeled shoe for Mrs Dai Bread Two the
gypsy, but he hammers it sternly out.
JACK BLACK (_To a hammer rhythm_)
There is _no leg_ belonging to the foot that belongs to this
shoe.
SECOND VOICE
The sun and the green breeze ship Captain Cat sea-memory
again.
CAPTAIN CAT
No, _I'll_ take the mulatto, by God, who's captain here?
Parlez-vous jig jig, Madam?
SECOND VOICE
Mary Ann Sailors says very softly to herself as she looks
out at Llaregyb Hill from the bedroom where she was born
MARY ANN SAILORS (_Loudly_)
It is Spring in Llaregyb in the sun in my old age, and
this is the Chosen Land.
[_A choir of children's voices suddenly cries out on one,
high, glad, long, sighing note_
FIRST VOICE
And in Willy Nilly the Postman's dark and sizzling damp
tea-coated misty pygmy kitchen where the spittingcat
kettles throb and hop on the range, Mrs Willy Nilly steams
open Mr Mog Edwards' letter to Miss Myfanwy Price and
reads it aloud to Willy Nilly by the squint of the Spring
sun through the one sealed window running with tears,
while the drugged, bedraggled hens at the back door
whimper and snivel for the lickerish bog-black tea.
MRS WILLY NILLY
From Manchester House, Llaregyb. Sole Prop: Mr Mog Edwards
(late of Twll), Linendraper, Haberdasher, Master Tailor,
Costumier. For West End Negligee, Lingerie, Teagowns,
Evening Dress, Trousseaux, Layettes. Also Ready to Wear
for All Occasions. Economical Outfitting for Agricultural
Employment Our Speciality, Wardrobes Bought. Among Our
Satisfied Customers Ministers of Religion and J.P.'s.
Fittings by Appointment. Advertising Weekly in the _Twll
Bugle_. Beloved Myfanwy Price my Bride in Heaven,
MOG EDWARDS
I love you until Death do us part and then we shall be
together for ever and ever. A new parcel of ribbons has
come from Carmarthen to-day, all the colours in the
rainbow. I wish I could tie a ribbon in your hair a white
one but it cannot be. I dreamed last night you were all
dripping wet and you sat on my lap as the Reverend Jenkins
went down the street. I see you got a mermaid in your lap
he said and he lifted his hat. He is a proper Christian.
Not like Cherry Owen who said you should have thrown her
back he said. Business is very poorly. Polly Garter bought
two garters with roses but she never got stockings so what
is the use I say. Mr Waldo tried to sell me a woman's
nightie outsize he said he found it and we know where. I
sold a packet of pins to Sinbad Sailors to pick his
teeth. If this goes on I shall be in the workhouse. My
heart is in your bosom and yours is in mine. God be with
you always Myfanwy Price and keep you lovely for me in His
Heavenly Mansion. I must stop now and remain, Your Eternal,
Mog Edwards.
MRS WILLY NILLY
And then a little message with a rubber stamp. Shop at
Mog's!!!
FIRST VOICE.
And Willy Nilly, rumbling, jockeys out again to the
three-seated shack called the House of Commons in the back
where the hens weep, and sees, in sudden Springshine,
SECOND VOICE
herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the
fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy
sea smooth to the sea's end as it lulls in blue. Green and
gold money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers,
pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and
leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of
fishes through the cold sea-streets. But with blue lazy
eyes the fishermen gaze at that milkmaid whispering water
with no nick or ripple as though it blew great guns and
serpents and typhooned the town.
FISHERMAN
Too rough for fishing to-day.
SECOND VOICE
And they thank God, and gob at a gull for luck, and
moss-slow and silent make their way uphill, from the still
still sea, towards the Sailors Arms as the children
[_School bell_
FIRST VOICE
spank and scamper rough and singing out of school into the
draggletail yard. And Captain Cat at his window says soft
to himself the words of their song.
CAPTAIN CAT (_To the beat of the singing_)
Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail
Kept their baby in a milking pail
Flossie Snail and Johnnie Crack
One would pull it out and one would put it back
O it's my turn now said Flossie Snail
To take the baby from the milking pail
And it's my turn now said Johnnie Crack
To smack it on the head and put it back
Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail
Kept their baby in a milking pail
One would put it back and one would pull it out
And all it had to drink was ale and stout
For Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail
Always used to say that stout and ale
Was _good_ for a baby in a milking pail.
[_Long pause_
FIRST VOICE
The music of the spheres is heard distinctly over Milk
Wood. It is 'The Rustle of Spring.'
SECOND VOICE
A glee-party sings in Bethesda Graveyard, gay but muffled.
FIRST VOICE
Vegetables make love above the tenors
SECOND VOICE
and dogs bark blue in the face.
FIRST VOICE
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard belches in a teeny hanky and chases
the sunlight with a flywhisk, but even she cannot drive
out the Spring: from one of the finger-bowls a primrose
grows.
SECOND VOICE
Mrs Dai Bread One and Mrs Dai Bread Two are sitting
outside their house in Donkey Lane, one darkly one plumply
blooming in the quick, dewy sun. Mrs Dai Bread Two is
looking into a crystal ball which she holds in the lap of
her dirty yellow petticoat, hard against her hard dark
thighs.
MRS DAI BREAD TWO
Cross my palm with silver. Out of our housekeeping money.
Aah!
MRS DAI BREAD ONE
What d'you see, lovie?
MRS DAI BREAD TWO
I see a featherbed. With three pillows on it. And a text
above the bed. I can't read what it says, there's great
clouds blowing. Now they have blown away. God is Love, the
text says.
MRS DAI BREAD ONE (_Delighted_)
That's _our_ bed.
MRS DAI BREAD TWO
And now it's vanished. The sun's spinning like a top.
Who's this coming out of the sun? It's a hairy little man
with big pink lips. He got a wall eye.
MRS DAI BREAD ONE
It's Dai, it's Dai Bread!
MRS DAI BREAD TWO
Ssh! The featherbed's floating back. The little man's
taking his boots off. He's pulling his shirt over his
head. He's beating his chest with his fists. He's
climbing into bed.
MRS DAI BREAD ONE
Go on, go on.
MRS DAI BREAD TWO
There's two women in bed. He looks at them both, with his
head cocked on one side. He's whistling through his teeth.
Now he grips his little arms round one of the women.
MRS DAI BREAD ONE
Which one, which one?
MRS DAI BREAD TWO
I can't see any more. There's great clouds blowing again.
MRS DAI BREAD ONE
Ach, the mean old clouds!
[_Pause. The children's singing fades_
FIRST VOICE
The morning is all singing. The Reverend Eli Jenkins, busy
on his morning calls, stops outside the Welfare Hall to
hear Polly Garter as she scrubs the floors for the
Mothers' Union Dance to-night.
POLLY GARTER (_Singing_)
I loved a man whose name was Tom
He was strong as a bear and two yards long
I loved a man whose name was Dick
He was big as a barrel and three feet thick
And I loved a man whose name was Harry
Six feet tall and sweet as a cherry
But the one I loved best awake or asleep
Was little Willy Wee and he's six feet deep.
O Tom Dick and Harry were three fine men
And I'll never have such loving again
But little Willy Wee who took me on his knee
Little Willy Wee was the man for me.
Now men from every parish round
Run after me and roll me on the ground
But whenever I love another man back
Johnnie from the Hill or Sailing Jack
I always think as they do what they please
Of Tom Dick and Harry who were tall as trees
And most I think when I'm by their side
Of little Willy Wee who downed and died.
O Tom Dick and Harry were three fine men
And I'll never have such loving again
But little Willy Wee who took me on his knee
Little Willy Weazel was the man for me.
REV. ELI JENKINS
Praise the Lord! We are a musical nation.
SECOND VOICE
And the Reverend Jenkins hurries on through the town to
visit the sick with jelly and poems.
FIRST VOICE
The town's as full as a lovebird's egg.
MR WALDO
There goes the Reverend,
FIRST VOICE
says Mr Waldo at the smoked herring brown window of the
unwashed Sailors Arms,
MR WALDO
with his brolly and his odes. Fill 'em up, Sinbad, I'm on
the treacle to-day.
SECOND VOICE
The silent fishermen flush down their pints.
SINBAD
Oh, Mr Waldo,
FIRST VOICE
sighs Sinbad Sailors,
SINBAD
I dote on that Gossamer Beynon.
FIRST VOICE
Love, sings the spring. The bedspring grass bounces
under bird's bums and lambs. And Gossamer Beynon, school
teacher, spoon-stirred and quivering, teaches her
slubberdegulleon class.
CHILDREN'S VOICES
It was a lover and his lass, with a hey and a ho and a hey
nonny no
GOSSAMER BEYNON
Now, now, now, your accents, children. It was a lover and
his lass, with a hey and a ho and a hey nonny no
SINBAD SAILORS
Oh, Mr Waldo
FIRST VOICE
says Sinbad Sailors
SINBAD SAILORS
She's a lady all over.
FIRST VOICE
And Mr Waldo, who is thinking of a woman soft as Eve and
sharp as sciatica to share his bread-pudding bed, answers
MR WALDO
No lady that I know is
SINBAD
And if only grandma'd die, cross my heart I'd go down on
my knees Mr Waldo and I'd say Miss Gossamer I'd say
CHILDREN'S VOICES
When birds do sing hey ding a ding a ding
Sweet lovers love the Spring...
SECOND VOICE
Polly Garter sings, still on her knees,
POLLY GARTER
Tom Dick and Harry were three fine men
And I'll never have such
CHILDREN
ding a ding
POLLY GARTER
again.
FIRST VOICE
And the morning school is over, and Captain Cat at his
curtained schooner's porthole open to the Spring sun tides
hears the naughty forfeiting children tumble and rhyme on
the cobbles.
GIRLS' VOICES
Gwennie call the boys
They make such a noise.
GIRL
Boys boys boys
Come along to me
GIRLS' VOICES
Boys boys boys
Kiss Gwennie where she says
Or give her a penny.
Go on, Gwennie.
GIRL
Kiss me in Goosegog Lane
Or give me a penny.
What's your name?
FIRST BOY
Billy.
GIRL
Kiss me in Goosegog Lane Billy
Or give me a penny silly.
FIRST BOY
Gwennie Gwennie
I kiss you in Goosegog Lane.
Now I haven't got to give you a penny.
GIRLS' VOICES
Boys boys boys
Kiss Gwennie where she says
Or give her a penny.
Go on, Gwennie.
GIRL
Kiss me on Llaregyb Hill
Or give me a penny.
What's your name?
SECOND BOY
Johnnie Cristo.
GIRL
Kiss me on Llaregyb Hill Johnnie Cristo
Or give me a penny mister.
SECOND BOY
Gwennie Gwennie
I kiss you on Llaregyb Hill.
Now I haven't got to give you a penny.
GIRLS' VOICES
Boys boys boys
Kiss Gwennie where she says
Or give her a penny.
Go on, Gwennie.
GIRL
Kiss me in Milk Wood
Or give me a penny.
What's your name?
THIRD BOY
Dicky.
GIRL
Kiss me in Milk Wood Dicky
Or give me a penny quickly.
THIRD BOY
Gwennie Gwennie
I can't kiss you in Milk Wood.
GIRLS' VOICES
Gwennie ask him why.
GIRL
Why?
THIRD BOY
Because my mother says I mustn't.
GIRLS' VOICES
Cowardy cowardy custard
Give Gwennie a penny.
GIRL
Give me a penny.
THIRD BOY
I haven't got any.
GIRLS' VOICES
Put him in the river
Up to his liver
Quick quick Dirty Dick
Beat him on the bum
With a rhubarb stick.
Aiee!
Hush!
FIRST VOICE
And the shrill girls giggle and master around him and
squeal as they clutch and thrash, and he blubbers away
downhill with his patched pants falling, and his
tear-splashed blush burns all the way as the triumphant
bird-like sisters scream with buttons in their claws and
the bully brothers hoot after him his little nickname and
his mother's shame and his father's wickedness with the
loose wild barefoot women of the hovels of the hills. It
all means nothing at all, and, howling for his milky mum,
for her cawl and buttermilk and cowbreath and welshcakes
and the fat birth-smelling bed and moonlit kitchen of her
arms, he'll never forget as he paddles blind home through
the weeping end of the world. Then his tormentors tussle
and run to the Cockle Street sweet-shop, their pennies
sticky as honey, to buy from Miss Myfanwy Price, who is
cocky and neat as a puff-bosomed robin and her small round
buttocks tight as ticks, gobstoppers big as wens that
rainbow as you suck, brandyballs, winegums, hundreds and
thousands, liquorice sweet as sick, nougat to tug and
ribbon out like another red rubbery tongue, gum to glue
in girls' curls, crimson coughdrops to spit blood,
ice-cream cornets, dandelion-and-burdock, raspberry and
cherryade, pop goes the weasel and the wind.
SECOND VOICE
Gossamer Beynon high-heels out of school The sun hums down
through the cotton flowers of her dress into the bell of
her heart and buzzes in the honey there and couches and
kisses, lazy-loving and boozed, in her red-berried breast.
Eyes run from the trees and windows of the street,
steaming 'Gossamer,' and strip her to the nipples and the
bees. She blazes naked past the Sailors Arms, the only
woman on the Dai-Adamed earth. Sinbad Sailors places on
her thighs still dewdamp from the first mangrowing
cockcrow garden his reverent goat-bearded hands.
GOSSAMER BEYNON
I don't care if he _is_ common,
SECOND VOICE
she whispers to her salad-day deep self,
GOSSAMER BEYNON
I want to gobble him up. I don't care if he _does_ drop his
aitches,
SECOND VOICE
she tells the stripped and mother-of-the-world big-beamed
and Eve-hipped spring of her self,
GOSSAMER BEYNON
so long as he's all cucumber and hooves.
SECOND VOICE
Sinbad Sailors watches her go by, demure and proud and
schoolmarm in her crisp flower dress and sun-defying hat,
with never a look or lilt or wriggle, the butcher's
unmelting icemaiden daughter veiled for ever from the
hungry hug of his eyes.
SINBAD SAILORS
Oh, Gossamer Beynon, why are you so proud?
SECOND VOICE
he grieves to his guinness,
SINBAD SAILORS
Oh, beautiful beautiful Gossamer B, I wish I wish that you
were for me. I wish you were not so educated.
SECOND VOICE
She feels his goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the
world like a tuft of wiry fire, and she turns in a terror
of delight away from his whips and whiskery conflagration,
and sits down in the kitchen to a plate heaped high with
chips and the kidneys of lambs.
FIRST VOICE
In the blind-drawn dark dining-room of School House, dusty
and echoing as a dining-room in a vault, Mr and Mrs Pugh
are silent over cold grey cottage pie. Mr Pugh reads, as
he forks the shroud meat in, from _Lives of the Great
Poisoners_. He has bound a plain brown-paper cover round
the book. Slyly, between slow mouthfuls, he sidespies up
at Mrs Pugh, poisons her with his eye, then goes on
reading. He underlines certain passages and smiles in
secret.
MRS PUGH
Persons with manners do not read at table,
FIRST VOICE
says Mrs Pugh. She swallows a digestive tablet as big as a
horse-pill, washing it down with clouded peasoup water.
[_Pause_
MRS PUGH
Some persons were brought up in pigsties.
MR PUGH
Pigs don't read at table, dear.
FIRST VOICE
Bitterly she flicks dust from the broken cruet. It settles
on the pie in a thin gnat-rain.
MR PUGH
Pigs can't read, my dear.
MRS PUGH
I know one who can.
FIRST VOICE
Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes, Mr Pugh
minces among bad vats and jeroboams, tiptoes through
spinneys of murdering herbs, agony dancing in his
crucibles, and mixes especially for Mrs Pugh a venomous
porridge unknown to toxicologists which will scald and
viper through her until her ears fall off like figs, her
toes grow big and black as balloons, and steam comes
screaming out of her navel.
MR PUGH
You know best, dear,
FIRST VOICE
says Mr Pugh, and quick as a flash he ducks her in rat
soup.
MRS PUGH
What's that book by your trough, Mr Pugh?
MR PUGH
It's a theological work, my dear. _Lives of the Great
Saints_.
FIRST VOICE
Mrs Pugh smiles. An icicle forms in the cold air of the
dining-vault.
MRS PUGH
I saw you talking to a saint this morning. Saint Polly
Garter. She was martyred again last night. Mrs Organ
Morgan saw her with Mr Waldo.
MRS ORGAN MORGAN
And when they saw me they pretended they were looking for
nests,
SECOND VOICE
said Mrs Organ Morgan to her husband, with her mouth full
of fish as a pelican's.
MRS ORGAN MORGAN
But you don't go nesting in long combinations, I said to
myself, like Mr Waldo was wearing, and your dress nearly
over your head like Polly Garter's. Oh, they didn't fool me.
SECOND VOICE
One big bird gulp, and the flounder's gone. She licks her
lips and goes stabbing again.
MRS ORGAN MORGAN
And when you think of all those babies she's got, then all
I can say is she'd better give up bird nesting that's all
I can say, it isn't the right kind of hobby at all for a
woman that can't say No even to midgets. Remember Bob
Spit? He wasn't any bigger than a baby and he gave her
two. But they're two nice boys, I will say that, Fred Spit
and Arthur. Sometimes I like Fred best and sometimes I
like Arthur. Who do you like best, Organ?
ORGAN MORGAN
Oh, Bach without any doubt. Bach every time for me.
MRS ORGAN MORGAN
Organ Morgan, you haven't been listening to a word I said.
It's organ organ all the time with you.
FIRST VOICE
And she bursts into tears, and, in the middle of her salty
howling, nimbly spears a small flatfish and pelicans it
whole.
ORGAN MORGAN
And then Palestrina,
SECOND VOICE
says Organ Morgan.
FIRST VOICE
Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down
alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps
and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for
each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their
black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth
away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks,
china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like
Noah's whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships,
clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers,
tu-wit-tu-woo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius
clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that
cataract their ticks, old time-weeping clocks with ebony
beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time
without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six
singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass
lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark
day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill,
but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different
times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime,
and tock.
SECOND VOICE
The lust and lilt and lather and emerald breeze and
crackle of the bird-praise and body of Spring with its
breasts full of rivering May-milk, means, to that lordly
fish-head nibbler, nothing but another nearness to the
tribes and navies of the Last Black Day who'll sear and
pillage down Armageddon Hill to his double-locked
rusty-shuttered tick-tock dust-scrabbled shack at the
bottom of the town that has fallen head over bells in love.
POLLY GARTER
And I'll never have such loving again,
SECOND VOICE
pretty Polly hums and longs.
POLLY GARTER (_Sings_)
Now when farmers' boys on the first fair day
Come down from the hills to drink and be gay,
Before the sun sinks I'll lie there in their arms
For they're good bad boys from the lonely farms,
But I always think as we tumble into bed
Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead...
[_A silence_
FIRST VOICE
The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through
the dozy town. The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with
fishes sleeping in its lap. The meadows still as Sunday,
the shut-eye tasselled bulls, the goat-anddaisy dingles,
nap happy and lazy. The dumb duck-ponds snooze. Clouds sag
and pillow on Llaregyb Hill. Pigs grunt in a wet
wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream
of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for
pig-fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal
and snuffle of yesses of the women pigs in rut. They
mud-bask and snout in the pig-loving sun; their tails
curl; they rollick and slobber and snore to deep, smug,
after-swill sleep. Donkeys angelically drowse on Donkey
Down.
MRS PUGH
Persons with manners,
SECOND VOICE
snaps Mrs cold Pugh,
MRS PUGH
do not nod at table.
FIRST VOICE
Mr Pugh cringes awake. He puts on a soft-soaping smile: it
is sad and grey under his nicotine-eggyellow weeping
walrus Victorian moustache worn thick and long in memory
of Doctor Crippen.
MRS PUGH
You should wait until you retire to your sty,
SECOND VOICE
says Mrs Pugh, sweet as a razor. His fawning measly
quarter-smile freezes. Sly and silent, he foxes into his
chemist's den and there, in a hiss and prussic circle
of cauldrons and phials brimful with pox and the Black
Death, cooks up a fricassee of deadly nightshade,
nicotine, hot frog, cyanide and bat-spit for his needling
stalactite hag and bednag of a pokerbacked nutcracker
wife.
MR PUGH
I beg your pardon, my dear,
SECOND VOICE
he murmurs with a wheedle.
FIRST VOICE
Captain Cat, at his window thrown wide to the sun and the
clippered seas he sailed long ago when his eyes were blue
and bright, slumbers and voyages; ear-ringed and rolling,
I Love You Rosie Probert tattooed on his belly, he brawls
with broken bottles in the fug and babel of the dark dock
bars, roves with a herd of short and good time cows in
every naughty port and twines and souses with the drowned
and blowzy-breasted dead. He weeps as he sleeps and sails.
SECOND VOICE
One voice of all he remembers most dearly as his dream
buckets down. Lazy early Rosie with the flaxen thatch,
whom he shared with Tom-Fred the donkeyman and many
another seaman, clearly and near to him speaks from the
bedroom of her dust. In that gulf and haven, fleets by the
dozen have anchored for the little heaven of the night;
but she speaks to Captain napping Cat alone. Mrs Probert...
ROSIE PROBERT
from Duck Lane, Jack. Quack twice and ask for Rosie
SECOND VOICE
...is the one love of his sea-life that was sardined with
women.
ROSIE PROBERT (_Softly_)
What seas did you see,
Tom Cat, Tom Cat,
In your sailoring days
Long long ago?
What sea beasts were
In the wavery green
When you were my master?
CAPTAIN CAT
I'll tell you the truth.
Seas barking like
seals, Blue seas and green,
Seas covered with eels
And mermen and whales.
ROSIE PROBERT
What seas did you sail
Old whaler when
On the blubbery waves
Between Frisco and Wales
You were my bosun?
CAPTAIN CAT
As true as I'm here
Dear you Tom Cat's tart
You landlubber Rosie
You cosy love
My easy as easy
My true sweetheart,
Seas green as a bean
Seas gliding with swans
In the seal-barking moon.
ROSIE PROBERT
What seas were rocking
My little deck hand
My favourite husband
In your seaboots and hunger
My duck my whaler
My honey my daddy
My pretty sugar sailor.
With my name on your belly
When you were a boy
Long long ago?
CAPTAIN CAT
I'll tell you no lies.
The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.
ROSIE PROBERT,
Knock twice, Jack,
At the door of my grave
And ask for Rosie.
CAPTAIN CAT
Rosie Probert.
ROSIE PROBERT
Remember her.
She is forgetting.
The earth which filled her mouth
Is vanishing from her.
Remember me.
I have forgotten you.
I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever.
I have forgotten that I was ever born.
CHILD
Look,
FIRST VOICE
says a child to her mother as they pass by the window of
Schooner House,
CHILD
Captain Cat is crying
FIRST VOICE
Captain Cat is crying
CAPTAIN CAT
Come back, come back,
FIRST VOICE
up the silences and echoes of the passages of the eternal
night.
CHILD
He's crying all over his nose,
FIRST VOICE
says the child. Mother and child move on down the street.
CHILD
He's got a nose like strawberries,
FIRST VOICE
the child says; and then she forgets him too. She sees in
the still middle of the bluebagged bay Nogood Boyo fishing
from the _Zanzibar_.
CHILD
Nogood Boyo gave me three pennies yesterday but I wouldn't,
FIRST VOICE
the child tells her mother.
SECOND VOICE
Boyo catches a whalebone corset. It is all he has caught
all day.
NOGOOD BOYO
Bloody funny fish!
SECOND VOICE
Mrs Dai Bread Two gypsies up his mind's slow eye, dressed
only in a bangle.
NOGOOD BOYO
She's wearing her nightgown. (_Pleadingly_) Would you like
this nice wet corset, Mrs Dai Bread Two?
MRS DAI BREAD TWO
No, I _won't!_
NOGOOD BOYO
And a bite of my little apple?
SECOND VOICE
he offers with no hope.
FIRST VOICE
She shakes her brass nightgown, and he chases her out of
his mind; and when he comes gusting back, there in the
bloodshot centre of his eye a geisha girl grins and bows
in a kimono of ricepaper.
NOGOOD BOYO
I want to be _good_ Boyo, but nobody'll let me,
FIRST VOICE
he sighs as she writhes politely. The land fades, the sea
flocks silently away; and through the warm white cloud
where he lies, silky, tingling, uneasy Eastern music
undoes him in a Japanese minute.
SECOND VOICE
The afternoon buzzes like lazy bees round the flowers
round Mae Rose Cottage. Nearly asleep in the field of
nannygoats who hum and gently butt the sun, she blows love
on a puffball.
MAE ROSE COTTAGE (_Lazily_)
He loves me
He loves me not
He loves me
He loves me not
He _loves_ me!--the dirty old fool.
SECOND VOICE
Lazy she lies alone in clover and sweet-grass, seventeen
and never been sweet in the grass ho ho.
FIRST VOICE
The Reverend Eli Jenkins inky in his cool front parlour or
poem-room tells only the truth in his Lifework--the
Population, Main Industry, Shipping, History, Topography,
Flora and Fauna of the town he worships in--the White Book
of Llaregyb. Portraits of famous bards and preachers, all
fur and wool from the squint to the kneecaps, hang over
him heavy as sheep, next to faint lady watercolours of
pale green Milk Wood like a lettuce salad dying. His
mother, propped against a pot in a palm, with her
wedding-ring waist and bust like a black-clothed
dining-table suffers in her stays.
REV. ELI JENKINS
Oh angels be careful there with your knives and forks,
FIRST VOICE
he prays. There is no known likeness of his father Esau,
who, undogcollared because of his little weakness, was
scythed to the bone one harvest by mistake when sleeping
with his weakness in the corn. He lost all ambition and
died, with one leg.
REV. ELI JENKINS
Poor Dad,
SECOND VOICE
grieves the Reverend Eli,
REV. ELI JENKINS
to die of drink and agriculture.
SECOND VOICE
Farmer Watkins in Salt Lake Farm hates his cattle on the
hill as he ho's them in to milking.
UTAH WATKINS (_In a fury_)
Damn you, you damned dairies!
SECOND VOICE
A cow kisses him.
UTAH WATKINS
Bite her to death!
SECOND VOICE
he shouts to his deaf dog who smiles and licks his hands.
UTAH WATKINS
Gore him, sit on him, Daisy!
SECOND VOICE
he bawls to the cow who barbed him with her tongue, and
she moos gentle words as he raves and dances among his
summerbreathed slaves walking delicately to the farm. The
coming of the end of the Spring day is already reflected
in the lakes of their great eyes. Bessie Bighead greets
them by the names she gave them when they were maidens.
BESSIE BIGHEAD
Peg, Meg, Buttercup, Moll,
Fan from the Castle,
Theodosia and Daisy.
SECOND VOICE
They bow their heads.
FIRST VOICE
Look up Bessie Bighead in the White Book of Llaregyb and
you will find the few haggard rags and the one poor
glittering thread of her history laid out in pages there
with as much love and care as the lock of hair of a first
lost love. Conceived in Milk Wood, born in a barn, wrapped
in paper, left on a doorstep, bigheaded and bass-voiced
she grew in the dark until long-dead Gomer Owen kissed her
when she wasn't looking because he was dared. Now in the
light she'll work, sing, milk, say the cows' sweet names
and sleep until the night sucks out her soul and spits it
into the sky. In her life-long low light, holily Bessie
milks the fond lake-eyed cows as dusk showers slowly down
over byre, sea and town.
Utah Watkins curses through the farmyard on a carthorse.
UTAH WATKINS
Gallop, you bleeding cripple!
FIRST VOICE
and the huge horse neighs softly as though he had given it
a lump of sugar.
Now the town is disk. Each cobble, donkey, goose and
gooseberry street is a thoroughfare of dusk; and dusk and
ceremonial dust, and- night's first darkening snow, and
the sleep of birds, drift under and through the live dusk
of this place of love. Llaregyb is the capital of dusk.
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, at the first drop of the
dusk-shower, seals all her sea-view doors, draws the
germ-free blinds, sits, erect as a dry dream on a
high-backed hygienic chair and wills herself to cold,
quick sleep. At once, at twice, Mr Ogmore and Mr
Pritchard, who all dead day long have been gossiping like
ghosts in the woodshed, planning the loveless destruction
of their glass widow, reluctantly sigh and sidle into her
clean house.
MR PRITCHARD
You first, Mr Ogmore.
MR OGMORE
After you, Mr Pritchard.
MR PRITCHARD
No, no, Mr Ogmore. You widowed her first.
FIRST VOICE
And in through the keyhole, with tears where their eyes
once were, they ooze and grumble.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
Husbands,
FIRST VOICE
she says in her sleep. There is acid love in her voice for
one of the two shambling phantoms. Mr Ogmore hopes that it
is not for him. So does Mr Pritchard.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
I love you both.
MR OGMORE (_With terror_)
Oh, Mrs Ogmore.
MR PRITCHARD (_With horror_)
Oh, Mrs Pritchard.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
Soon it will be time to go to bed. Tell me your tasks in
order.
MR OGMORE AND MR PRITCHARD
We must take our pyjamas from the drawer marked pyjamas.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD (_Coldly_)
And then you must take them off.
SECOND VOICE
Down in the dusking town, Mae Rose Cottage, still lying in
clover, listens to the nannygoats chew, draws circles of
lipstick round her nipples.
MAE ROSE COTTAGE
I'm _fast_. I'm a bad lot. God will strike me dead. I'm
seventeen. I'll go to hell,
SECOND VOICE
she tells the goats.
MAE ROSE COTTAGE
You just wait. I'll sin till I blow up!
SECOND VOICE
She lies deep, waiting for the worst to happen; the goats
champ and sneer.
FIRST VOICE
And at the doorway of Bethesda House, the Reverend Jenkins
recites to Llaregyb Hill his sunset poem.
REV. ELI JENKINS
Every morning when I wake,
Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,
O please to keep Thy lovely eye
On all poor creatures born to die
And every evening at sun-down
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no
I'm sure is always touch-and-go.
We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first
To see our best side, not our worst.
O let us see another day!
Bless us all this night, I pray,
And to the sun we all will bow
And say, good-bye--but just for now!
FIRST VOICE
Jack Black prepares once more to meet his Satan in the
Wood. He grinds his night-teeth, closes his eyes, climbs
into his religious trousers, their flies sewn up with
cobbler's thread, and pads out, torched and bibled,
grimly, joyfully, into the already sinning dusk.
JACK BLACK
Off to Gomorrah!
SECOND VOICE
And Lily Smalls is up to Nogood Boyo in the wash-house.
FIRST VOICE
And Cherry Owen, sober as Sunday as he is every day of the
week, goes off happy as Saturday to get drunk as a deacon
as he does every night.
CHERRY OWEN
I always say she's got two husbands,
FIRST VOICE
says Cherry Owen,
CHERRY OWEN
one drunk and one sober.
FIRST VOICE
And Mrs Cherry simply says
MRS CHERRY OWEN
And aren't I a lucky woman? Because I love them both.
SINBAD
Evening, Cherry.
CHERRY OWEN
Evening, Sinbad.
SINBAD
What'll you have?
CHERRY OWEN
Too much.
SINBAD
The Sailors Arms is always open...
FIRST VOICE
Sinbad suffers to himself, heartbroken,
SINBAD
...oh, Gossamer, open yours!
FIRST VOICE
Dusk is drowned for ever until to-morrow, It is all at
once night now, The windy town is a hill of windows, and
from the larrupped waves the lights of the lamps in the
windows call back the day and the dead that have run away
to sea. All over the calling dark, babies and old men are
bribed and lullabied to sleep.
FIRST WOMAN'S VOICE
Hushabye, baby, the sandman is coming...
SECOND WOMAN'S VOICE (Singing)
Rockabye, grandpa, in the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
Down will come grandpa, whiskers and all.
FIRST VOICE
Or their daughters cover up the old unwinking men like
parrots, and in their little dark in the lit and bustling
young kitchen corners, all night long they watch,
beady-eyed, the long night through in case death catches
them asleep.
SECOND VOICE
Unmarried girls, alone in their privately bridal bedrooms,
powder and curl for the Dance of the World.
[_Accordion music: dim_
They make, in front of their looking-glasses, haughty or
come-hithering faces for the young men in the street
outside, at the lamplit leaning corners, who wait in the
all-at-once wind to wolve and whistle.
[_Accordion music louder, then fading under_
FIRST VOICE
The drinkers in the Sailors Arms drink to the failure of
the dance.
A DRINKER
Down with the waltzing and the skipping.
CHERRY OWEN
Dancing isn't natural,
FIRST VOICE
righteously says Cherry Owen who has just downed seventeen
pints of flat, warm, thin, Welsh, bitter beer.
SECOND VOICE
A farmer's lantern glimmers, a spark on Llaregyb hillside.
[_Accordion music fades into silence_
VOICE FIRST
Llaregyb Hill, writes the Reverend Jenkins in his poem-room,
REV. ELI JENKINS
Llaregyb Hill, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of
peoples that dwelt in the region of Llaregyb before the
Celts left the Land of Summer and where the old wizards
made themselves a wife out of flowers.
SECOND VOICE
Mr Waldo, in his corner of the Sailors Arms, sings:
MR WALDO
In Pembroke City when I was young
I lived by the Castle Keep
Sixpence a week was my wages
For working for the chimbley-sweep.
Six cold pennies he
gave me Not a farthing more or less
And all the fare I could afford
Was parsnip gin and watercress.
I did not need a knife and fork
Or a bib up to my chin
To dine on a dish of watercress
And a jug of parsnip gin.
Did you ever hear a growing boy
To live so cruel cheap
On grub that has no flesh and bones
And liquor that makes you weep?
Sweep sweep chimbley sweep,
I wept through Pembroke City
Poor and barefoot in the snow
Till a kind young woman took pity.
Poor little chimbley sweep she said
Black as the ace of spades
O nobody's swept my chimbley
Since my husband went his ways
Come and sweep my chimbley
Come and sweep my chimbley
She sighed to me with a blush
Come and sweep my chimbley
Come and sweep my chimbley
Bring along your chimbley brush!
FIRST VOICE
Blind Captain Cat climbs into his bunk. Like a cat, he
sees in the dark. Through the voyages of his tears he
sails to see the dead.
CAPTAIN CAT
Dancing Williams!
FIRST DROWNED
Still dancing.
CAPTAIN CAT
Jonah Jarvis
THIRD DROWNED
Still.
FIRST DROWNED
Curly Bevan's skull.
ROSIE PROBERT
Rosie, with God. She has forgotten dying.
FIRST VOICE
The dead come out in their Sunday best.
SECOND VOICE
Listen to the night breaking.
FIRST VOICE
Organ Morgan goes to chapel to play the organ. He sees
Bach lying on a tombstone.
ORGAN MORGAN
Johann Sebastian!
CHERRY OWEN (_Drunkenly_)
Who?
ORGAN MORGAN
Johann Sebastian mighty Bach. Oh, Bach Bach
CHERRY OWEN
To hell with you,
FIRST VOICE
says Cherry Owen who is resting on the tombstone on his
way home.
Mr Mog Edwards and Miss Myfanwy Price happily apart from
one another at the top and the sea end of the town write
their everynight letters of love and desire. In the warm
White Book of Llaregyb you will find the little maps of
the islands of their contentment.
MYFANWY PRICE
Oh, my Mog, I am yours for ever.
FIRST VOICE
And she looks around with pleasure at her own neat
neverdull room which Mr Mog Edwards will never enter.
MOG EDWARDS
Come to my arms, Myfanwy.
FIRST VOICE
And he hugs his lovely money to his _own_ heart.
And Mr Waldo drunk in the dusky wood hugs his lovely Polly
Garter under the eyes and rattling tongues of the
neighbours and the birds, and he does not care. He smacks
his live red lips.
But it is not _his_ name that Polly Garter whispers as she
lies under the oak and loves him back. Six feet deep that
name sings in the cold earth.
POLLY GARTER (Sings)
But I always think as we tumble into bed
Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead.
FIRST VOICE
The thin night darkens. A breeze from the creased water
sighs the streets close under Milk waking Wood. The Wood,
whose every tree-foot's cloven in the black glad sight of
the hunters of lovers, that is a God-built garden to Mary
Ann Sailors who knows there is Heaven on earth and the
chosen people of His kind fire in Llaregyb's land, that is
the fairday farmhands' wantoning ignorant chapel of
bridesbeds, and, to the Reverend Eli Jenkins, a greenleaved
sermon on the innocence of men, the suddenly wind-shaken
wood springs awake for the second dark time this one
Spring day.
THE END